StarDestroyer.Net BBS

After waiting a lifetime, literally, sometime this week I will finally recieve a model of a French pre-dreadnought.
Hooray for me, yes?

Now, where this becomes problematic for me is that I can't find a definitive color scheme for it.
In period color tinted photos, and profile artwork, French ships of the period appear with black hulls with buff/yellow upperworks, and black hulls with white/light grey upperworks. And any combination of those colors.

Observe:
Photo from the kit review. This pic is from the cover a book printed in 1992, and I'm 99% sure the colorization of the original B&W photo dates from then.

Period B&W piccie. What this photo is causing me problems with is that the smoke stacks appear white(or at least considerably lighter), while the fighting top on the fore mast and the mast itself appear to be buff/yellow.
The white above the black hull is obvious, but shadows and light tricks are causing me some doubt once you get above the deckline.

Another period photo, au naturel. Here, the color above the black demarcation line appears uniform, and dark enough to make me think it's a uniform yellow.

Different ship, period color tinted photo. It's an example of the Black/White Light Grey color scheme; and seeing as how it's a tinted photo, I can't accept it as being really accurate without something to verify it.

Now it's getting interesting...Notice how the funnels appear dark? Is that due to the type of film used, or were they actually dark?
(Yellow appearing dark in old photographs is something that has caused headaches for modelers for decades and decades, people loudly claiming that Werner Voss's Fokker Triplane had a yellow cowling are treated as trolls on some boards)

This may seem a little obsessive, trying to find as many obscure photographs you can find of obscure subjects just to paint a piece of resin, but hey; that's the nature of AMS, and we're all nerds here. No shame in letting my geek flag fly, is there?

If anyone has any experience with this kind of thing, or knows of any computer techniques to gauge color, I'd appreciate what you have to say.

From the descriptions I've been reading recently you are correct with the original colour scheme of black hull with white uppers and yellow trim. I've never read anything that mentions buff or yellow citadels though, that's a new one on me. From what I've read of the British Navy however, the Captains used to paint their own vessels regularly and at their own expense so that they'd look as fine as possible during reviews, and often details like funnel colour and trim might change slightly depending on how he felt. As long as he didn't paint it pink or something I think they could trim their ship how they liked.

Kenny_10_Bellys wrote:From the descriptions I've been reading recently you are correct with the original colour scheme of black hull with white uppers and yellow trim. I've never read anything that mentions buff or yellow citadels though, that's a new one on me. From what I've read of the British Navy however, the Captains used to paint their own vessels regularly and at their own expense so that they'd look as fine as possible during reviews, and often details like funnel colour and trim might change slightly depending on how he felt. As long as he didn't paint it pink or something I think they could trim their ship how they liked.

Yeah, the classic Victorian color scheme is pretty standard, even for non-warships. The White Star Line painted their ships almost according to RN guidelines.
The US navy famously used an all-buff upperworks on white hulls color scheme, and that was also used for most European ships serving on foreign stations at the time, too.
But it's the home waters scheme I'm looking for, and the French one, at that.
Check this out, that's almost certainly solid yellow on a black hull.
Damned Frenchmen, why couldn't they have made this easy?


I'm seriously considering going with the solid yellow on black, getting good coverage with white is such an extreme pain in the ass I'll take any break I can get.